The
Register: “Thousands of websites around the world – from the
UK’s NHS and ICO to the US government’s court system – were
today secretly mining crypto-coins on netizens’ web browsers for
miscreants unknown. The
affected sites all use a fairly popular plugin called Browsealoud,
made by Brit biz Texthelp, which reads out webpages for blind or
partially sighted people. This technology was compromised in some
way – either by hackers or rogue insiders altering Browsealoud’s
source code – to silently inject Coinhive’s
Monero miner into every webpage offering Browsealoud. For
several hours today, anyone who visited a site that embedded
Browsealoud inadvertently ran this hidden mining code on their
computer, generating money for the miscreants behind the caper. A
list of 4,200-plus affected websites can
be found here

Decryption
keys for a current version of Cryakl ransomware have been obtained
and uploaded to the NoMoreRansom website. Victims of Cryakl can
potentially recover encrypted files with the Rakhni Decryptor
available for free from Kaspersky Lab or NoMoreRansom.

NoMoreRansom
is a collaborative public/private project launched
by Europol, the Dutch National Police, Kaspersky Lab and McAfee in
July 2016.

David
Danks thinks a lot about the implications of artificial
intelligence. In fact, the Carnegie Mellon University philosophy and
psychology professor presented his very first research paper at an
artificial intelligence conference in Seattle in 2001.

Now, 17 years later, Danks sits at the center of
one of the most fascinating (and some might say terrifying debates):
How will artificial intelligence effect the human species?

Or, put another way, should we be scared of the
robotic future?

… There’s a 50 percent chance that AI will
be able to outperform humans in all jobs in the next 45 years, with
full automation potentially occurring in 120 years, according
to recent research. Some jobs — like retail sales — are
projected to be fully automated in less than 20 years.

… Danks — whose research
papers have titles such as Trust But Verify: The Difficulty
of Trusting Autonomous Weapons Systems and Algorithmic Bias
in Autonomous Systems— is in a perfect place to discuss
weighty topics of AI and automation, in part because his counterparts
at the nearby School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon are some
of the best in the world at developing intelligent robots. In that
regard, Danks has a front row seat to the coming revolution, one that
Barack Obama even warned
about in his last public interview as president.

Take its effect of flattening the world, for
instance. It doesn’t matter if two people are a thousand miles
away or sitting in the same room, the internet allows them to send or
receive money with the mere tap of a smartphone button. Of course,
this also means hackers a world away can even wipe out someone’s
life savings in a matter of seconds.

From an e-commerce perspective, the internet
allows for the selling of literally anything to anyone. Regarding
the sneaker industry, this fact turned a culture predicated on love
into one based on business. Because of this, the internet is equally
the best, and worst, innovation to happen to sneakers.

Today, hyper sneaker enthusiasts — colloquially
referred to as “sneakerheads”
— are normally the ones scouring the internet for hyped sneakers
with high demand. People
make tens of thousands of dollars per month simply reselling
shoes, a central reason the sneaker resale market is
estimated to be worth
roughly $1 billion. An entrepreneurial spirit is well and good
until you realize in order for those sneakerheads to make that much
money, they have to use the
internet to ensure the average person never has a chance at the most
coveted of releases.

If it is truly replacing the Simpsons as the face
of America, that’s great!

My friend Lynne Haultain is
one of the smartest Australians I know. A dark-haired former radio
host, she can boil down just about any complicated subject to a
single, delicious epigram. So not long ago, when she told me her
theory of the media and globalism and Donald Trump, my ears shot up
like Tom Friedman’s. “Podcasting,” Haultain said, “is the
new soft diplomacy.”

The idea, she explained over
lunch this week, is simple. Haultain always maintained a
relationship with America. For decades, that relationship was forged
through watching The Wire and reading books like The Art
of Fielding and stacking up back issues of The New Yorker
next to her bedside. Haultain’s husband and daughter can
recite every line from the Australia
episode of The Simpsons.

But around the time Donald
Trump announced he was running for president, podcasts began to elbow
their way into that relationship. These days, the person explaining
the wonders and outrages of America is as likely to be New York
Times podcast host Michael Barbaro as it is Homer Simpson.

“I listen to The
Daily,” Haultain said. “I listen to Up First on
NPR. I listen to Trumpcast. I listen to Ezra Klein on Vox.
I listen to Mike Pesca on The Gist. Then I have a whole
bunch of historical ones. I just listened to Slow Burn on
Slate.”

… Whatever appeal
American podcasts might have had in Australia is doubled if they
offer an explanation for the Trump phenomenon. A lot of Australians
wonder how Trump got elected, and how he maintains even
sub-40-percent levels of support. Moreover, Trump generates so much
news that Australian newspapers and TV shows often don’t get deeper
than the outrageous headlines. A podcast — like it does for
Americans — offers the “forensic detail,” Haultain said.

… American podcasting serves a final
diplomatic function. It not only explainsTrump but is an
antidote to him. Where Trump is insular and
anti-intellectual, podcasting is a reminder that a large swath of
America isn’t. “I don’t want to sound trite about this,”
Haultain said, “but it saves your reputation.”

Based on the cooling spiral of recent solar
cycles, scientists from University of California, San Diego believe
the next “grand-minimum” is just decades away, during which the
Sun will be seven per cent cooler.

… During the grand-minimum in the mid-17th
century, named Maunder Minimum, the temperature dropped low enough to
freeze the Thames River.

… The phenomenon appears to offer a natural
solution to global warming, but scientists invalidated that idea.

They explained that the cooling effect of the
grand minimum could merely slow down global warming, but cannot stop
it.

Free to Use
and Reuse: Making Public Domain and Rights-Clear Content Easier to
Find

The
Library of Congress: “One of our biggest challenges is letting
you know about all of the content available at loc.gov.
Another challenge we have is letting you know what you can do with
it (in a nice way). We are working on several fronts to improve the
visibility of public domain and rights-clear content. We moved one
step in that direction today with the launch of our Free
to Use and Reuse page…”

The
Verge: “The publisher Elsevier owns over 2,500 journals
covering every conceivable facet of scientific inquiry to its name,
and it wasn’t happy about either of the sites. Elsevier charges
readers an average of $31.50 per paper for access; Sci-Hub and LibGen
offered them for free. But even after receiving the “YOU HAVE BEEN
SUED” email, Elbakyan was surprisingly relaxed. She went back to
work. She was in Kazakhstan. The lawsuit was in America. She had
more pressing matters to attend to, like filing assignments for her
religious studies program; writing acerbic blog-style posts on the
Russian clone of Facebook, called vKontakte; participating in various
feminist groups online; and attempting to launch a sciencey-print
T-shirt business. That 2015 lawsuit would, however, place a
spotlight on Elbakyan and her homegrown operation. The publicity
made Sci-Hub bigger, transforming it into the largest Open Access
academic resource in the world. In just six years of existence,
Sci-Hub had become a juggernaut: the 64.5 million papers it hosted
represented two-thirds of all published research, and it was
available to anyone…”

If you’re looking to access
an article behind a paywall, the only way to get it legally is to
pay, says Peter
Suber, director of Harvard’s Open Access Project. But there is
a gray area: you can ask an author for a copy. (Most academics will
oblige.) Aside from either that or finding articles published in
free Open Access journals, the next best option is to find
pre-publication copies of papers that authors have put in open-access
repositories like Cornell’s Arxiv.org.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.